About the NAACP Legal Defense Fund: Founded in 1940 under the leadership of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) is the nation's oldest civil rights law advocacy organization. It won the historic U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It has also been involved in most of the precedent-setting minority voting rights litigation and legislation in the U.S., including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its 1982 amendments, and the 1993 National Voter Registration Act